Poll: What do you use to analyze and/or visualize data?

I asked this same question a couple of years back. I wonder: has the software that people use for visualization and data graphics changed at all? Punch your answer in the poll below. If you select ‘other’ let us know your tool of choice in the comments.

P.S. I know many of you use a combination of these. Pick your favorite if that’s the case.

Everything I do starts with the data in an Excel spreadsheet and some initial cleaning/sorting/filtering/calculations there, so I felt obliged to click that. But Tableau Public is my favorite for easy online visualization and R for statistics and for power and flexibility in producing graphics. The following website is also great for quick and easy harnessing of R’s ggplot2 package for common statistical graphics: http://www.yeroon.net/ggplot2/. You can cut and paste the code for later customization in R itself.

Excel is not an analytical tool, poor reproducibility, poor statistical routines and poor graphics (adding a third dimension is totally unnecessary unless you have three variables you are wishing to graph).

For me actually a mixture of Excel, Processing and in some rare cases R. But in most cases Excel is only for pre-analyzing and a first impression of the dataset, and for some exporting/importing stuff. Processing for the actual visual analysis and final visualization.

I jumped into this data world almost a year ago and have been doing most of my work in excel for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s what is on my computer
2. Most of the reports I pull from for my work come in two flavors: pdf or excel
3. Excel, since its on most computers, makes it easy to send a file or let others review my work
4. It’s what I know and have been working with since college
5. Graphs are simple and with features like conditional formatting heatmaps are practically built-in.

That being said I, I started reading this blog because I do want to get deeper into this field. So what would you recommend for someone who is comfortable with excel, has limited resources but wants to do more?

Of interest to me is how the audience is organized in terms of profession and time on task doing data analysis and visual analytics vs or alongside data/info visualization. Lots of hammers here and lots of nails. What are folks actually building with the tools?

Full disclosure: We are Tableau evangelists of the first order, so take that for what it is worth. Check out the #Tableau and #TCC2010 stream on Twitter for some feedback from a wider audience of users.

Also, I am happy to have any offline conversation on the matter of tools for the tasks at hand.

I notice that SPSS is not on the list and only has one vote in the comments. Do folks not use SPSS? I ask because I teach an undergrad stats class for psychology majors and I like to give them some exposure to data analysis software (other than excel).

I mostly use Excel, but I really like TinkerPlots for disaggregating and looking for patterns. And I also really like the latest visualizations that Google Spreadsheets has, especially the Gapminder-like motion graphs.

Chalk me up as another who still defaults to Matlab. Heck, I’ve even been known to write what are essentially shell scripts in Matlab because it’s just that easy. Inefficient, of course. But it beats figuring out the idiosyncrasies between tsch and bash, or, heaven forbid, learning Perl.

I keep meaning to migrate to Processing, Protovis, and/or Matplotlib. Just need the right excuse…